The fight against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, may be one of the most important fights ever waged on the internet. It threatens to change the course of the web's development, and not for the better.

Given the impact this dark and misguided legislation would have on the internet economy, it's no surprise that many are coming together to do what they can to ensure it doesn't become law.

The media is starting to pay attention, and SOPA supporters like GoDaddy are seeing that such support comes at a cost. These things provide some hope that SOPA will be defeated.

YouTube has acquired RightsFlow, a company that helps songwriters, recording artists, labels, distributors, and online music services set up licensing and royalties arrangements.

Announced via a blog post on Friday, David King, YouTube product manager wrote that, “Smart copyright management is an important part of this online video service - it helps songwriters and performers to be appropriately compensated for their works, while also allowing for those works to be used in new ways.”

This probably seems like 'newsjacking'. It might be. I'll try to get to bottom of what makes ‘Benton’ so shareable. (For the record, I know it's actually 'Fenton').

People in the digital industry are obsessed with memes because they spend all their days on the internet.

And it’s obviously clear that the recreation of this level of ‘sharability’ is the holy grail for brands, who find it difficult to convince the customer to suspend their disbelief when being sold to.

Some sources point to a shared piece of content being three times more likely to be viewed than a ‘paid’ piece. Below I attempt a cod analysis of ‘Benton’, to find out what makes him so sharable, along with some famous examples of adverts and video content that apply the same principles.

After what seems like years of rumors and speculation, Google finally launched a digital music service yesterday.

Dubbed Google Music, the service can be accessed through a mobile app and the Android Market website. Through deals with EMI, Universal, Sony and a multitude of indie labels, Google says that it's today offering upwards of 8m songs, with millions more coming soon.

Social media may be alive and well, but some of the most prominent web properties that rose during 'Web 2.0' have seen better days.

From Digg to Delicious, if the rise and fall of companies that were supposed to change the web, if not the world, reminds us of anything, it's this: the consumer internet market evolves rapidly, and can be as brutal to the losers as it is rewarding to the winners.

But can a Web 2.0 has-been be brought back to life by a couple of entrepreneurs who built one of its biggest winners? Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who founded YouTube, hope so.

Just as you can use traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques to make your web pages more visible in online searches, you can optimise your videos to make them more visible on YouTube.

This is certainly a desirable goal. Research has found that video is the universal search category that is most visible in Google searches, and YouTube content was found to be most prominent when video integrations do appear on Google.

And of course, as the most important video platform and video search engine in the world, YouTube has the potential to be a powerful marketing tool. So what factors do you need to consider?